Searching for better plasmonic materials

By P. West, Satoshi Ishii, Gururaj V. Naik, N. Emani, Vladimir M. Shalaev, Alexandra Boltasseva. 2009

2,003 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Plasmonics is a research area merging the fields of optics and nanoelectronics by confining light with relatively large free‐space wavelength to the nanometer scale ‐ thereby enabling a family of novel devices. Current plasmonic devices at telecommunication and optical frequencies face significant challenges due to losses encountered in the constituent plasmonic materials. These large losses seriously limit the practicality of these metals for many novel applications. This paper provides an overview of alternative plasmonic materials along with motivation for each material choice and important aspects of fabrication. A comparative study of various materials including metals, metal alloys and heavily doped semiconductors is presented. The performance of each material is evaluated based on quality factors defined for each class of plasmonic devices. Most importantly, this paper outlines an approach for realizing optimal plasmonic material properties for specific frequencies and applications, thereby providing a reference for those searching for better plasmonic materials.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32e3702f5a56f432647a55bf1661423f9680a6eb

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Gate-tuning of graphene plasmons revealed by infrared nano-imaging (2012, methodology): “According to equations (1) and (2), the plasmon wavelength lp is directly determined by the carrier density n.”
Plasmonic circuits for manipulating optical information (2016, background): “A review of work on new materials [216] discusses the advantages and disadvantages of various metals and semiconductors with the conclusion that silver, gold, and aluminum are still the best materials for SPPs and LSP resonances in the visible and ultraviolet regions.”
Graphene Photonics, Plasmonics, and Optoelectronics (2014, background): “Al) and certain other materials, is currently a particularly active field [38], [40]–[42].”
Photonic crystal fiber based plasmonic sensors (2017, background): “In contrast, aluminum as the plasmonic material, has not received much attention for sensing applications as its damping rate and optical losses are high [106].”
Bimetallic nanostructures: combining plasmonic and catalytic metals for photocatalysis (2019, background): “Another promising direction is to expand the variety of materials used, including plasmonically active metals like Al and Cu which are naturally more abundant and affordable than noble metals like Au and Ag [102,115].”
Transparent conducting oxides for electro-optical plasmonic modulators (2015, background): “Importantly, TCOs possess a unique property of having a small negative real part of the permittivity at the telecommunication wavelengths [59, 90].”